Kayce Dutton is a newly minted U.S. Marshal in action-packed Yellowstone spinoff Marshals
The bitter exit of Kevin Costner from Yellowstone may have slammed the brakes on one of television’s most successful dramas, but creator Taylor Sheridan has proven to have multiple cards up his sleeve to keep the franchise alive. These include previous prequels 1883 and 1923, and upcoming spinoffs The Dutton Ranch (focused on original star Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton and Cole Hauser’s Rip Wheeler), The Madison (about a New York City family relocating to Montana, with a cast headed by Michelle Pfeiffer), 6666 (a still-in-development series focused on Jefferson White’s Yellowstone character, Jimmy Hurdstrom) and 1944, a third prequel set during the Se cond World War.
Before all those, however, we have Marshals — which, unlike all the other shows, airs on CBS, not Paramount+. This time, the focus is on youngest Dutton scion Kayce, played once again by Luke Grimes. “With the Yellowstone Ranch behind him, Dutton joins an elite unit of U.S. Marshals, combining his skills as a cowboy and Navy SEAL to bring range justice to Montana,” states the network’s logline. “Kayce and his teammates — Pete Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green), Belle Skinner (Arielle Kebbel), Andrea Cruz (Ash Santos) and Miles Kittle (Tatanka Means) — must balance the high psychological cost of serving as the last line of defence in the region’s war on violence with their duty to their families, which for Kayce includes his son Tate (Brecken Merrill) and his confidants Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) and Mo (Mo Brings Plenty) from the Broken Rock Reservation.”
Showrunner Spencer Hudnut views Marshals as “a non-traditional procedural . . . a heavily character-driven show” intended to appeal to fans of the original series while also following the case-of-the-week format that has served CBS so well over the years. “My hope is that we have enough Yellowstone for the Yellowstone viewers and enough sort of kinetic action and drama to please the CBS viewers, as well,” he says.
For Grimes, who’d previously played Kayce in all five seasons of Yellowstone, Marshals places the character in unfamiliar terrain. In the pilot, viewers discover he’s a recent widower mourning the loss of Monica (Kelsey Asbille). “Where we meet him, he’s kind of just at the end of his emotional road,” says Grimes. “Obviously in the original series, so many really hard things have happened to this guy with his family, with his past, suffering PTSD from things that happened to him at war. And then, right when you meet him here, you pretty much find out that his wife has passed away.”
That twist, Grimes explains, emerged from his conversations with Sheridan. “Basically, Taylor and I talked about from the beginning . . . that was sort of Romeo and Juliet. They were like twin flames, they belonged together. And so, he loses his soulmate,” Grimes reflects. “You know, there’s really nothing darker than that. I remember even thinking, ‘How is this going to work? Maybe that’s too sad. Maybe that’s too much drama to just watch this guy be in so much pain.’ But the really great device of our show is that Kayce finds a purpose and a reason to get up in the morning, and that comes from his old SEAL buddy who comes and finds him and says, ‘Hey, I figured out a way to turn my life around and deal with my demons — and it’s becoming useful to other people in using our skill set to help out others.’ Through that, Kayce slowly but surely starts to find his way, starts to find a reason and a purpose. Obviously, he has his son, but beyond that, I think we find a really lost, lost man [at the start of the show].”
Interestingly, when Grimes filmed his final scenes for Yellowstone, he firmly believed that was the last time he’d ever play the character. “I thought Yellowstone was over,” he says. “I didn’t see any chance of it continuing, especially because Kayce’s arc ended so sort of perfectly, and I thought anything past that is just going to be boring to watch. You know, he’s happy, so that’s no fun; there’s no drama there. And when they started bringing up the fact that they were considering doing this, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it, until I met Spencer. He and I had a Zoom, and I just really liked him and I really liked his ideas. Up until that point, I didn’t think that this was going to happen. It was meeting him and hearing the idea and thinking, ‘There really is something there to explore. And Kayce can do some things in this show that people kind of wished he could’ve done in Yellowstone.’ That was exciting for me.”
As Hudnut noted, Marshals may follow the template of a procedural, but the emphasis will always be on the characters themselves. “We use the cases of the week or the missions, per se, as a way to reveal something about our characters,” he explains. “This is not a hardcore procedural where by the end of the first act we’ve been through seven red herrings and are putting clues together. It’s really a character-forward show. And so, I think in talking with Luke, when we started to put this show together, character is what excites us. We will always lean into character more than the procedure.”
Marshals airs Sundays on CBS